What should the tutoring be like for skills?
The nature of tutoring is different for different kinds of learning. It will look different depending on whether the learning targets entail skills, understandings, memorizing, dispositions, or social-emotional learning. For skills, including higher-order thinking skills, a tutorial should demonstrate the skill with an explanation of how to do it, and it should create an opportunity for authentic performance of the skill with immediate feedback that confirms correct performance and helps the student correct inadequate performance (usually with hints or questions, though sometimes explanations or demonstrations are needed). The practice, and often the demonstrations, should include the full range of ways the performance differs for different situations. Demonstrations and performances for higher-order thinking skills should often occur over months or even years and across a variety of subject areas and project types.
What should the tutoring be like for understandings?
Tutorials are different for the three major kinds of understanding: (1) causal, such as understanding the law of supply and demand; (2) natural process, such as understanding the life cycle of a flowering plant; and (3) conceptual, such as understanding what a civil war is.
For causal understanding, a tutorial should have two phases: acquisition and application. Whereas skills are developed gradually through practice, causal understanding is more like a light bulb that goes suddenly from dark to light. Acquisition is promoted by observing the effects of causal events. Teachers can present concrete events (examples of the causes and their effects) to the student, or the teacher can enable the student to manipulate a causal factor (or set of factors) and observe its effects. For example, a simple computer simulation could allow the student to use the arrow keys to change the thickness of a convex lens and observe the effects on the focal distance and image. Application is promoted by providing opportunities for the student to use that understanding in new situations to (a) make predictions (given a causal event, predict what its effects will be), (b) provide explanations (given an event, explain what caused it), or (c) solve problems (given a desired effect, often called the goal, identify and implement the causal events that will result in the desired effect, often called the solution).
For understanding a natural process, a tutorial should demonstrate the phases in the natural process (example) along with a description of the natural process (generality). It should provide opportunities for the student to apply the natural process (practice), like predicting what will happen next in a particular situation. Finally, the tutorial should provide immediate feedback.
For conceptual understanding, there are many dimensions, each of which is based on a different kind of relationship between two or more concepts. The most common kinds of relationships include superordinate (a civil war is a kind of war), coordinate (a civil war is not a revolutionary war), and subordinate (one type of civil war is a religious civil war). In these kinds of conceptual relationships, one concept can be either a type or a part of another. Other conceptual relationships include analogical, experiential, and functional. A tutorial should portray the relationship (description) and provide opportunities for the student to use the relationship (application) with immediate feedback. Common instructional strategies include context (for superordinate relationships), comparison and contrast (for coordinate relationships), analysis (for subordinate relationships), analogy (for analogical relationships), case study (for experiential relationships), and purpose (for functional relationships).
For more about tutoring these kinds of understanding, see Causal Understanding as a Developmental Primitive (Corrigan & Denton, 1996); Designing Games for Learning (Myers & Reigeluth, 2017); Dimensions of Causal Understanding: The Role of Complex Causal Models in Students’ Understanding of Science (Perkins & Grotzer, 2005); Meaningfulness and Instruction: Relating What Is Being Learned to What a Student Knows (Reigeluth, 1983); and An Instructional Theory for the Design of Computer-Based Simulations (Reigeluth & Schwartz, 1989).
What should the tutoring be like for memorizing information?
For information that is truly important to memorize (such as memorizing the names of all bones in the human body in medical school), drill-and-practice has two major parts: presenting what is to be memorized and practicing recalling or recognizing it. Other strategies include repetition; chunking (presenting no more than 7±2 items until mastered); spacing practice sessions across days, weeks, or months; prompting; and mnemonics (songs, rhymes, acronyms, and so on, like ROY G BIV to remember the colors in the rainbow; Myers & Reigeluth, 2017).
What should the tutoring be like for dispositions?
Tutoring for dispositions must address the three major components of dispositions: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. All three components must be developed (for a new disposition) or changed (for an existing bad disposition) simultaneously (Kamradt & Kamradt, 1999). The cognitive component requires persuasion through cognitive reasoning. The affective component requires the use of strategies that condition the student to have a positive feeling when demonstrating the disposition. An effective method is social modeling (Bandura, 1977, 1986), such as observing a person with whom the student can easily empathize in a film. Finally, the psychomotor component requires demonstrations and practice with feedback to develop the appropriate behaviors.
What should the tutoring be like for social-emotional learning?
Like dispositions, social-emotional learning has multiple components, including information, understandings, skills, and dispositions. This makes guidance for it more complex than other kinds of learning and beyond the scope of this book. Here we can say that, while much of this kind of learning occurs through normal human interactions (especially collaborative activities on projects), there are many situations in which students need or can benefit from direct tutoring. For guidance on methods for enhancing social and emotional development, see Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators (Elias et al., 1997); Social and Emotional Learning in Action: Experiential Activities to Positively Impact School Climate (Flippo, 2016); Social and Emotional Learning in the Classroom: Promoting Mental Health and Academic Success (Merrell & Gueldner, 2010); Transforming Education’s SEL Integration Approach for Classroom Educators (Transforming Education, 2019), and Building Academic Success on Social and Emotional Learning: What Does the Research Say? (Zins, Weissberg, Wang, & Walberg, 2004).
How should the tutoring be done?
If your whole school or district is not transforming to PCBE, then teachers will need to implement project-based learning and just-in-time tutorials within the course structure. They may not be able to offer students much choice of projects. One option for tutoring is to have students in a team provide it to each other, with the teacher observing and coaching such tutoring. It is often said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, so this benefits the tutor as well as the recipient (and the teacher). A variation of this is for students to create instructional tutorials for specific learning targets. Another option is to provide links to online tutorials like those from Khan Academy (Thompson, 2011). If students are working independently on projects that address similar skills, Marzano and colleagues (2017) offer helpful advice about creating a data wall with proficiency scales, so any student can easily find out which other students might be able to help him or her learn a particular topic or skill. Eventually, there will be electronic tools to serve the function of the data wall.
Principle G: Personalized Learning
To implement personalized learning, your team needs to make decisions about learning targets, projects, scaffolding, assessments, and reflections.
Personalized Learning Targets
Your team must decide the extent to which you can personalize